The DLR Crawler – a Six-Legged Actively Compliant Walking Robot

The DLR Crawler is a six-legged walking robot that is based on the fingers of the DLR Hand II. It is a preliminary version of future exploration robots that is used as test bed for the development and evaluation of different force and kinematics based gait and control algorithms. Due to their modularity and comprehensive sensor equipment the fingers of the DLR Hand II are very well suited as legs for this first prototype. The availability of joint torque sensors and 6 DOF force-torque sensors integrated in the finger tips allows the use of active compliance control as well as Cartesian impedance control. The crawler is automatically controlled in real-time by sophisticated exploration and navigation techniques, which use stereo vision based 3D ego motion calculation and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) methods. Furthermore, the data can be used for 3D modelling of the environment.